Swallow with spark quote on upper back
Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A black and grey swallow in flight, with outstretched wings and a banner beneath it reading "it's just a SPARK but its ENOUGH". A bold starburst with small dots sits to the right of the bird. The linework is bold and the wings and body are shaded in soft greys, with the composition centred on the bird across pale skin on the upper back.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The last train of the night pulls out of Carlisle with one carriage lit, and you are the only one in it who has not yet decided to be sad. The platform clock says twenty to midnight. Across the aisle a woman is folding a map into a hundred small squares, and a lad in a station-issue hi-vis is sweeping crisp packets toward the bins with the slow patience of someone who has done this for thirty years.
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You remember what your grandmother told you about swallows: they come back to the same barn every spring, whatever the weather did to the roof. She said they carry a little fire in their chest, a spark, and that is why they never settle. You thought it was nonsense when you were eight. Now you are thirty-one, your bag holds one ticket and a jar of her marmalade, and the window keeps showing you a small dark bird skimming the fields outside, keeping pace with the train as if it had been asked to.
At Preston the doors sigh open and nobody gets on. The bird is gone. In its place, pressed against the glass, a single spark spins off the wires overhead and bursts white over the car park, scattering into a hundred tiny stars that drift down to the tarmac.
You step off at the next stop with the marmalade under your arm. It is only a spark, you tell the empty platform, and it is enough to see by.
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